Name's Jason Thibeault. I'm an IT guy, skeptic, feminist, gamer and atheist, and love OSS, science of all stripes (especially space-related stuff), and debating on-line and off. I enjoy a good bit of whargarbl now and again, and will occasionally even seek it out. I am also apparently responsible for the death of common sense on the internet. My bad.

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EVENTS

These ads for some service called Speck apparently ran recently in New York. I’m sure New Yorkers have more important things to worry about right now, but I thought I’d catch the rest of you all up on this ad, which completely mangles the very concept of the Venn diagram to a far greater degree than I evercould.

Copyranter has more. Apparently the entire ad campaign is predicated on making three mutually exclusive categories and saying their service, Speck, is for people who are in the overlap between them. When people got annoyed, their response was apparently “lol we’re dumb.” Yeah, I have to say that advertising a service as being for exactly zero people isn’t the best way to sell your service.

Okay, in THIS case, Speck might be for the super-rich people who own two houses in two separate districts of town, and can afford them both. That’s still not exactly defining a huge niche for your product.

I had to wonder: Why have these sex-devaluing surveys become so popular?

In part, it’s good business. Take a survey finding that 43 percent of Canadians would choose bacon over sex – it was conducted by Maple Leaf Foods Inc., a bacon producer. Then there’s the one sponsored by the Better Sleep Council, a creation of the mattress industry, which found that 61 percent of American adults would choose a good night’s sleep over sex. See also: a survey by mobile app company Telenav which found that — surprise, surprise – one-third of Americans would rather go without sex than their cellphone. (On a related note, Gazelle, an electronics trade-in site, found that 15 percent of respondents would rather “give up sex than go for even a weekend without their iPhone.”) Sex is the ultimate measure of desire — so why wouldn’t a company try to position its product as shockingly even more desirable?